Stunning Japanese thriller with a chilling supernatural twist. The novel that inspired the cult Japanese movie and the Hollywood blockbuster of the same name. Asakawa is a hardworking journalist who has climbed his way up from local-news beat reporter to writer for his newspaper’s weekly magazine. A chronic workaholic, he doesn’t take much notice when his seventeen-year-old niece dies suddenly – … suddenly – until a chance conversation reveals that another healthy teenager died at exactly the same time, in chillingly similar circumstances.
Sensing a story, Asakawa begins to investigate, and soon discovers that this strange simultaneous sudden-death syndrome also affected another two teenagers. Exactly one week before their mysterious deaths the four teenagers all spent the night at a leisure resort in the same log cabin.
When Asakawa visits the resort, the mystery only deepens. A comment made in the guest book by one of the teenagers leads him to a particular vidoetape with a portentous message at the end:
Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now.
Asakawa finds himself in a race against time – he has only seven days to find the cause of the teenagers’ deaths before it finds him. The hunt puts him on the trail of an apocalytpic power that will force Asakawa to choose between saving his family and saving civilization.
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Ring had been sitting on one of my Amazon wishlists for a long time and I was needing some horror, so I finally bought it… despite the pile of unread books on my nightstand and the high amount of unread books on my Kindle.
The first thing I have to say is that this is not like either the Japanese or American movie. I started with the assumption that it would be, and I feel like that made it a bit difficult for me to get into the story immediately. If you decide to read this, don’t start it with the same assumption I did.
Once I got over it not being like the movies, I became immersed in the mystery of the video and wanted to find out who Sadako is and what gave her the powers to create the video. I enjoyed the characters, especially Ryuji, though I admit I thought he was a complete jerk when he was first introduced. When I finished the book, I know I wanted more of this series and to find out all the mysteries and horrors of Sadako that Suzuki created.
I will definitely be reading the rest of the Ring series and more of Suzuki’s work!
Years ago, I watched Hideo Nakata’s ‘Ringu,’ the Japanese horror film that kicked off a successful series of terrifying ghost stories both in Japan and here in the US. But it was only recently that I had the opportunity to read the novel that started it all—Ring by Koji Suzuki. When I first saw the movie, I was unnerved by the image of that strange girl Sadako, her hair exposing one hideous eye, crawling out of the television set from a well into the living room. There was something demonic about her, and though the film lacks gore, her victims’ deaths from sudden cardiac arrest are frightening.
Science plays a significant role in this story. Asakawa’s friend Ryuji has lots of great scientific explanations for the phenomena he and the reporter discover. But for all his theories, there seems to be an underlying current of superstition that lies deep in the Japanese character. You could imagine children being warned nightly about spooky ghosts and vengeful spirits—and demons.
But for all the talk about science and superstition, rarely is God ever mentioned. Ryuji comes close when he suggests that at the beginning of time, good and evil were the same—they were equal. But I don’t recall anyone in this story saying they needed to go to the local Buddhist temple to pray for help.
If you know anything about ‘Ringu,’ then you know Sadako is responsible for all the mayhem. In the movie, she was a girl; but in the novel, she is an adult and startlingly beautiful. And she has a deep hatred that takes the form of a video cassette from hell. If you watch it, you die a week later. But why should anyone want to visit this kind of evil on people they don’t even know? Because Sadako was abused, then murdered for who—and what—she was.
Perhaps the final lesson in this breathtaking novel is, treat others as you would yourself. Maybe then, you’ll live to a ripe old age.
A number of young people drop dead for no reason–at the exact same moment. A journalist tries to find out why.
While the general premise here is the same as the movie, the book reads like an investigation. The secret to stopping the mysterious virus doesn’t even show up until the end of the book! I really enjoyed this, and recommend it for horror/thriller aficionados. This is a book about how things are discovered, and how they are propigated, and what is, or is not, the truth. The way the story is told is a delightful reflection of that.